Thank you ‘Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Covid-19 Action Fund‘ for making it possible for us to develop our Boardbuilder for personalising and adapting symbols for easy to use communication and information charts. Many freely available Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) symbols are developed for children rather than adults. There are also many COVID-19 symbol charts on offer around the world, but they are rarely personalised and hospital and care home stays are usually more than a few days long. Boardbuilder will allow for different templates and a mix of any images and symbols to support those struggling to understand what they are being told or to express themselves.
We know we need to find symbols suitable for older people and particular medical items that are used in hospitals and for social care. We also need to make it easy for users to see many different types of symbols and upload images, as well as translating labels into different languages.
Symbols with complex medical terms are not readily available in most AAC symbol sets, so we have linked the OCHA Humanitarian Icons and Openmojis to the Global Symbols’ sets and hope to adapt other symbols that have open licences.
Making information and communication charts can take time, so we are determined to ensure BoardBuilder is very easy to use and offer print outs as well as enabling the output to work with a free text to speech / AAC applications on tablets etc.
By adding semantic embedding, alongside the present use of ConceptNet , the linking of symbol labels (glosses) should be more accurate and it will make it easier to find appropriate symbols. This will in turn speed chart making for those supporting people who are struggling with the masks and personal protection equipment being used in hospitals and care homes. In the future it will also help with text to symbol translations, as there are often several symbol options for one word.